Overview
- Alphabet shares, which jumped Thursday after its Q1 report, pushed the company’s market value past about $4.5 trillion to all‑time highs.
- Quarterly revenue rose 22% to roughly $110 billion as earnings per share hit $5.11, with Search up 19% and YouTube ads up 11%.
- Google Cloud revenue climbed 63% to $20 billion as operating margin reached about 33% and the backlog nearly doubled sequentially to around $462 billion, with roughly half expected to turn into revenue within two years.
- Management lifted 2026 capital‑expenditure guidance to $180–$190 billion and signaled heavier 2027 spending, citing AI compute demand that exceeds supply and usage metrics like more than 16 billion tokens processed per minute and 40% sequential growth in Gemini enterprise paid users.
- The surge narrowed Alphabet’s gap with Nvidia as investors reprice AI leaders, while new inquiries in Europe and Switzerland and tight supplies of chips, power, and data‑center capacity pose growing risks.